De första invandrarbyråerna. Om invandrares inkorporering på kommunal nivå åren 1965-1984

Sammanfattning: AbstractThe First Immigrant Bureaus.On immigrant incorporation on the local level the years 1965–1984.Immigration to Sweden increased during and after the Second World War. Initially the in-crease consisted of refugees, but after the war labour migration became the dominant form of migration to Sweden. The immigrants were expected to manage the adaptation to the Swedish society on their own, possibly with the help of voluntary organizations or the company they worked for. This situation began to change in the 1960s. The immigrants’ situation received public attention and different actions were taken to reduce the risk of marginalizing the immi-grants. Many of these actions started on a local level, in the municipalities, prior to the devel-opment of the first national immigrant policy in 1975. The first local public administrations for handling immigrant incorporation developed approximately ten years before. These or-ganizations, soon to be called Immigrant bureaus, were among the first public initiatives, on both state and local level, to actively take measures to incorporate the immigrants. The licen-tiate thesis is a comparative case study of five Swedish municipalities which started Immi-grant bureaus in the middle of the 1960s. The objective of the thesis is to study the creation and development of these organizations up until 1984. Thereby, the study gives an image of the creation and development of a specific local public administration for immigrant incorpo-ration. It describes and analyzes the common features of the bureaus as well as the unique character of each individual bureau. Accordingly, a theoretical perspective which stresses the early development in an organization’s history and accentuates the importance of specific contexts for understanding different organizational developments has been used. The result shows that the immigrant bureaus were initiated by different local actors, such as the public administration, labour unions and educational associations which meant that the purposes were somewhat divergent. Yet another consequence was not only variation in development between different bureaus, but also within each of them over time.